Disability reviews won’t save Social Security program from shortfall, official says

Thursday

Apr 10, 2014 at 11:51 AM

WASHINGTON — A major effort to ensure people collecting Social Security disability payments still deserve the benefits won’t save the program from a financial shortfall in two years, an agency official told a House subcommittee Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — A major effort to ensure people collecting Social Security disability payments still deserve the benefits won’t save the program from a financial shortfall in two years, an agency official told a House subcommittee Wednesday.

The Social Security Administration could clear its backlog of 1.3 million disability reviews and it would have "no significant impact on extending the life of the disability trust fund," said Marianna LaCanfora, an acting deputy commissioner at the agency.

LaCanfora’s testimony came at a hearing headed by Rep. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma City, whose subcommittee has been exploring the various aspects of the Social Security disability system — from judges who approve most of the cases they see to how long children should receive payments for attention deficit disorder.

Lankford and the top Democrat on the subcommittee, Rep. Jackie Speier, of California, who have worked for months on the issue, developed a set of recommendations released this week to ensure the benefits go to people who qualify for them.

The number of disabled workers collecting benefits has risen from about 3 million in 1980 to nearly 11 million in 2012. There are an additional 8 million people, including children, collecting Supplemental Security Income.

The disability insurance fund has been so stressed by the influx that agency trustees expect shortfalls in 2016.

Much of the work done by Lankford — and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Muskogee — has been on potential fraud and on failures by the Social Security Administration to review the judges involved in the system and the beneficiaries who must be re-evaluated every few years.

Government watchdogs — including the Government Accountability Office and the inspector general for the Social Security Administration — have also chronicled weaknesses in the system for awarding and reviewing disability payments.

Lankford and Speier noted in a letter to the agency on Tuesday that the law requires medical disability reviews be conducted every three years for people who weren’t expected to be permanently disabled. However, the agency has a backlog of 1.3 million reviews, with nearly 1 million of those for Supplemental Security Income.

LaCanfora said the agency agrees the reviews are a good investment. They return $9 for every $1 spent, she said. However, the agency has lost 11,000 employees in the last few years and Congress has not budgeted enough money to catch up with the reviews, she said.

The agency puts a priority on adult reviews because the average payment to a disabled adult, about $1,150 a month, is twice as much as the average payment to a child, LaCanfora said.

Child reviews

Daniel Bertoni, with the GAO, said it was true that the Social Security Administration lacked the necessary resources but argued that the agency could better manage its resources.

Some of the children receiving payments have ailments — such as speech problems or ADHD — that have rates of improvement or cessation, Bertoni said, and the agency is missing opportunities to conduct reviews that would terminate payments.

According to the GAO, more than 24,000 disability reviews for children are overdue by more than six years, including more than 6,000 for children who were expected to improve within six to 18 months of their initial determination.

LaCanfora said the agency is expected to get enough money to conduct 510,000 reviews in this fiscal year — up from 429,000 last year — and to do 888,000 next year. Though acknowledging the reviews would save billions of dollars, she said they wouldn’t save the disability system.

"Whether it’s a lot of money or not a lot of money, the system has to have integrity," Speier said.